Two Film Scripts
(As yet unrealized)
##Voyage into the Heartland
America is defined by movement and transit from place to place; this film will try to fix on different locations which flicker past, all of which constitute the unknown and mysterious wilderness of this country, always more an idea than a place. The folkways of cities of an abandoned heartland, Richmond VA, Charleston SC, burned out cities in Ohio, Chicago, Detroit, West Virginia, the south constellated by Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Atlanta, green waves of heat in Missisipi and Alabama- all of the most feudal and hidden, forbidden sections of this country which has theoretically replicated itself all over the world, the patches which have not yet been colonized entirely, still clinging to parochial identities which are the last frontier of defense against total homogenization. In the humid air of highways crisscrossing the south, a new concept of space began to take shape, one concerned with the spiritual truth of a region which has been constantly occupied, terrorized and riven by violence for hundreds of years. Natives dispersed to the huge cities of the wider world reconvene to claim the lakes and mountains, dusty, lonely towns and sedate cities, fields of green, roadside restaraunts and strange accents of their homeland for their own.
##Nighttime Diary
This film is about the feeling of loneliness in a huge metropolis. Coincidentally, it is set in Shanghai, but could have been in Paris, London, New York, Moscow, etc. The delicious feeling of reflecting solitarily while walking down a boulevard at twilight is the main subject of the film. The nocturnal existence of sex and drugs and drinking, a dream within the dream of living- consumption stripped of use value and reduced (or heightened) to ritual. Taxis go past, trains; windows it up in mysterious establishments whose true nature is never discovered, botanical gardens shrouded by dark shadows. The city is the apogee of man’s residue in the land, the night too (as it conceals all lighting but artificial); the combination of the two is a mysterious zone utterly human yet utterly alien, even in the quarters which are our own daily haunts.